Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy: The Importance of Whimsy in VR
How high-concept silliness is helping virtual reality expand its audience.
“Take a look at the employee evaluations,” instructs a floating television doing its best imitation of Office Space’s Bill Lumbergh. Opening a file cabinet with your disembodied, white-gloved hands, you briefly consider investigating some of the files before getting distracted by the copy machine above it. Curious, you open up the device and lean down to press your face against the tray. You hit the copy button, and the machine lights up as it scans the image. A copy of your brain pops out into the tray. After a quick examination and contemplation of your own consciousness, you douse the thing in coffee and throw it at your Boss-Bot, who shudders and sparks. This is Job Simulator, and it exemplifies a whimsical approach to VR — an approach that, with just a dash of hyperbole, demonstrates the truly transformative potential for VR.
There’s a pervasive sameness to the current landscape of VR games. The heaviness of gritty shoot-em-ups, horror games, shoot-em-up horror games, and attempts at awe-inspiring cinematic experiences threaten to weigh down the entire genre. This isn’t an exaggeration — games where you’re either trying not to die, or are transported to some incredible, real-world setting (e.g., the Grand Canyon, ocean depths, Mt. Everest) comprise the majority of offerings for the HTC Vive.
Fortunately, a small but growing number of developers are creating games that don’t feel the need to milk your adrenal glands dry. Teams like those at Owlchemy Labs, VR Unicorns, and Radial Games bring lightheartedness and levity to their games, creating a much-needed space for whimsy in the still-evolving medium.
The rise of these lighthearted virtual reality experiences that are both fun and funny are perhaps a pushback against all of those serious, gritty, grimy, games. Job Simulator, Selfie Tennis, and Fantastic Contraption do more than serve as a counterweight. They might be silly, but they enrich the VR landscape, illuminating the path to content that is uniquely suited to the medium and broadening the audiences the industry hopes to reach.
VR Needs Whimsy for Mass Appeal
(WARNING: The following passage contains an over-generalization of the PC gaming community. Please do not kill me.)
When the dedicated community of PC gamers invested the energy that helped VR gain critical mass, they brought along an appreciation for action, adventure, and first-person shooters. The current VR bench of dark, intense shooting games reflects the technology’s current audience. Some of the newer, more whimsical games are designed with VR’s future audience in mind — a group with greater diversity of age, gender and gaming experience. Lindsay Jorgensen, artistic director for Fantastic Contraption, argues that traditional gaming makes an imperfect model for VR, which she claims “is not going to replace flat games. It’s there for a bunch of different people.”
Some of the newer, more whimsical games are designed with VR’s future audience in mind — a group with greater diversity of age, gender and gaming experience.
There’s precedent for the idea that whimsy can define a platform and expand its appeal well beyond an existing market. Almost exactly 10 years ago, the Nintendo Wii was launched. The Wii focused on the intuitive controls and physical engagement which accompanied the new, gesture-tracking technology (which current VR devices still rely upon). The easy-to-understand controls and inviting interface let the entire family feel comfortable taking part in the experience — so much so that the Wii sold over 100 million units, 20 million more than either of the other consoles of that generation. But a crucial factor in the Wii’s success was that it shipped with Wii Sports, a game that reflected the console’s overall lightheartedness and accessibility while showcasing its new gesture-tracking technology.
Like the Wii, the controls for VR are far more intuitive than any gamepad — successful games like Job Simulator, Selfie Tennis, and Fantastic Contraption effectively communicate that appeal for anyone who dons a HMD. Valve and HTC already seem to be thinking along these lines, offering a free suite of whimsical games (Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption, and Tilt Brush) with every Vive sold. These games offer a gentle entry for VR novices, particularly those outside the PC gaming community. Their bright, simple, pastel-colored environments are not as grating or off-putting as the gloomy grays of the shooter games. While they give the player tasks to complete — changing a car’s headlight fluid, or building a contraption to transport a ball across a floating island — they aren’t timed, and they encourage creativity.
Experiences like Job Simulator that offer guided, goal-oriented creation gives the user a defined pursuit (unlike Tilt Brush) without the pressure or aggression of a wave-based shooter. This form of structured creativity demonstrates to gamers and non-gamers alike that the medium is one in which you can be yourself and be rewarded for it. When you’re asked to make the “Chef’s Special,” you can make a nice steak sandwich or blend up some paper and broken glass — whatever floats your boat. Sure, it might sound a little touchy-feely when Cy Wise, Owlmancer for Owlchemy Labs, says “We didn’t want to put people in a situation where they were uncomfortable.” But to reach the 2.5 million headset sales anticipated, content creators will need to cast a wide net, and demonstrate that VR can be a fun place for all to inhabit.
Sometimes I feel I’ve got to run away (to VR)
It’s difficult to understate how important the feeling of comfort is for VR. While everyone seems concerned with how to tell stories in this new medium, the eager response to “silly” experiences suggests that we are asking the wrong question, and that the focus ought to be on building a world for the user before shoving them into the narrative. Yes, every VR game has to give the user a feeling of presence, but without the time pressure of attacking zombies/robots/monsters, these lighthearted games must also perform the more complex task of creating a world that people can actually inhabit, e.g. one that holds up under scrutiny and exploration.
While everyone seems concerned with how to tell stories in this new medium, the eager response to “silly” VR experiences suggests that we are asking the wrong question. The focus ought to be on building a world for the user before shoving them into the narrative.
Since so much of VR hype emphasizes the prospect of complete escapism, it’s strange that so little of the content actually encourages that escapism. These lighthearted games have lessons for all content creators about how to create worlds that people don’t mind spending time inhabiting — worlds that offer an escape so complete they can help overcome real-world problems like chronic pain, various phobias, and PTSD.
Some of the steps to helping the user escape the real world are pretty simple. Rule One: don’t break “presence” with reminders of the limitations of the virtual world. When creating Job Simulator, the folks at Owlchemy focused on areas where one is naturally constrained to a fairly limited space, but where there’s still a wide variety of items to play with.
Positioning the player in these spaces (kitchen counter, convenience store counter, cubicle, mechanic’s shop), along with a few tricks to artificially expand the variety of items available, gives aspiring cooks and mechanics plenty to explore without feeling limited by their inability to wander.
Fantastic Contraption’s makers also found opportunity for whimsy within technical limits. When trying to devise a toolbox that would follow the user, the clunkiness of trying to assign functions to buttons or gestures gave way to the creation of Neko, a floating green cat who follows players and furnishes all necessary tools to achieve their goal.
But these games go beyond just finding clever ways to accommodate to VR’s restrictions. Building a convincing sense of presence is important, but enabling users to take action as they see fit is where these games really excel. By ensuring that there is an appropriate response for any action the user chooses to take, they allow us to interact with the virtual world on our own terms, empowering us to do what we want.
For Job Simulator, that response is probably a punchline. Owlchemy Labs designed their game based on extensive observation. To craft the game’s abundant jokes, Wise recalls, “we got as many play testers as possible, from as many different backgrounds as possible, and we wanted to see what they did…we wanted to make sure there was a joke for everything.”
Building a convincing sense of presence is important, but enabling the user to take action as they see fit allows us to interact with the world around us on our own terms.
That commitment to immersion in goofs is clear when playing the final product. If you take the initiative to copy money in the office, the counterfeit bills will be clearly marked as fake and rejected by the vending machine. Fiddle with the radio as a mechanic, and you’ll find Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland voicing a sentient automobile for the show Cars Talking, a parody of NPR’s Car Talk.
But what’s most empowering about these games is that they don’t care what you do. While they’ll give you something to do, you’re also free to do nothing at all. Feel free to just throw things at the wall in Job Simulator. According to Jorgensen, Fantastic Contraption’s world was designed specifically to accommodate inaction. “We wanted to make it a pleasant place, a place you want to spend a lot of time in…Some of the best responses we got were from people who said ‘I don’t want to play the game, I just want to stare up at the weird things in the sky, and play with this weird green cat.’ People would just not play the game and experience the world.”
That encouragement to goof around or to just sit back and relax can’t be found in the blank abyss into which Tilt Brush places the user, and certainly not in the hostile worlds of games like The Brookhaven Experiment.
“The medium is different, but the jokes are the same.”
All that said, the teams that are making these games are not simply doing so because they feel a burning need to expand the appeal of virtual reality — they were simply bringing their own voices into VR. For both Owlchemy and Fantastic Contraption, the VR experiences that they created were extensions of their existing sensibilities. Fantastic Contraption is a ground-up re-envisioning of a flash game from 2008. The fundamentals of the original game — floating islands, fluffy clouds, and machines that don’t feel overly mechanical — are still present in the Vive version, though they’ve been expanded upon in order to create a fuller, more immersive game.
Similarly, when creating Job Simulator, Owlchemy Labs brought the humorous style to the Vive that they had to earlier games like Snuggle Truck or Jack Lumber. Wise described their team’s sense of humor as fundamental to their organization, and present in everything they create including Job Simulator: “The medium is different, but the jokes are the same.”
Feeling the Vibe without owning a Vive
The next step in building greater comfort within VR seems to be expanding its community, both in terms of content creators and audience. After the warm reception of Job Simulator, Owlchemy is helping to bring other comedic voices into the realm of VR, continuing their collaboration with Justin Roiland by creating a Vive-ready Rick and Morty game.
Smaller voices are also getting a chance to express themselves, as Fantastic Contraption and Job Simulator recently integrated features which make it easier to stream on Twitch. Incorporating Twitch chat and a third-person camera enables streamers to perform in a way that’s unique to VR. Wise noted the challenges of making their jokes accessible to a third party: “That feeling of empathy in VR is between the player and the experience. If you’re trying to share the player’s experience with a wider audience, it works better with different options.”
Letting spectators — especially the younger audience of Twitch — get in on the jokes expands the appeal, not just for the individual games but for VR as a whole, opening up access to those who may not have the $800 (minimum) to drop on a Vive.
By bucking the trend towards seriousness, gloom, intense activity, and aggression seen elsewhere in the VR landscape, games like Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption, and Selfie Tennis offer crucial insights about VR. They teach us how to create content that appeals to the wider audience that will help VR grow, is pleasant to inhabit for more than a few rounds of gory shooting, and is shareable with the wider world — all of which helps bring the technology which has so excited Silicon Valley into the realm of the everyday person who could use a laugh, or just wants to get away.
